A review by shelleys_book_nook
The Night the River Wept by Lo Patrick

adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.0

I am an outlier once again but this time on the positive side, I enjoyed this book. I loved Lo Patrick’s first book The Floating Girls so when I saw this on NEtgally I jumped at the chance to read it and am I ever glad I did. I love Southern fiction, especially the historical variety. This one takes place in the very early oughts (historical?) but the case being looked at happened in 1983. Most of the timeline is from twenty years ago, but we get journal entries, investigation details, and discussions about what happened back then.

I found the main character, Arlene, a little annoying. She was very immature at times and her thoughts seemed to ramble. The entire book is from her perspective and there is a lot of internal dialogue. I liked this because I felt like I got to know Arlene a little better. The unsolved case gives her something to do while she mourns a lost pregnancy and deals with her husband’s alcoholism.

The crime itself evoked a lot of feelings in me, the death of children is hard on the psyche. Lo Patrick writes beautiful engaging stories and she makes the setting an atmospheric part of it all, whether it be tensions between characters or the temperature I felt like I was there. I was so disturbed by how different people are treated from the other side of the tracks and so was Alrlene. If you’re looking for a haunting mystery, look no further.